Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. - Miriam Beard

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Fire of Vesuvius n Cool blues of Capri

So here goes my next blog entry...this trip was to napoli(naples) and I hadn't expected it to be this good but believe me this was my best trip till now...

To begin with, let me tell you the details of my journey...

bus from camerino to castel-raimondo(20 mins)

train from castel-raimondo to fabriano (35 mins)

train from fabriano to rome (3.5 hrs)

train from rome to naples (2 hrs)

After my last entry, I got a comment that during this trip no INCIDENT(ohhhh sorry ACCIDENT) happened to you. Ensure that during your next trip something interesting happens. True to the word, this trip started with one. I reached castel raimondo well in time to catch my train at 7.25 for fabriano only to discover that the train was 40 mins late...and the situation was so critical for me because that meant I will spent my night at fabriano( a very small place,but bigger than camerino), which was not safe.

So I was just kicking some chairs in the waiting room when there entered a girl .....seeing her I sat down quitely...it was her who asked me first,"what happened,something wrong?"...I told her my sad story and later found out that she also wanted to go to fabriano ...I was pretty relieved to have company at least till fabriano...she knew a little about INDIA and I was so immersed in the agony of being on the fabriano station for the night that it was quite late when I realized that she was speaking english....oh great...i had met an english speaking gal in italy...and later i found out she was also studying in Camerino only...after talking to her during the journey finally we exchanged phone numbers and she went to her home while I prepared to sleep on the station platform.

I reached Naples next morning and standing outside the railway station I could see garbage strewn around...some walls smelling of urine...beggars around.....ohh it seemed so much like paharganj of italy....I actually felt nostalgic there. When I called up the other guys of my group, they told me that we are going to Capri island ....i thought what a dumb idea.....being in naples and instead of going to Mt. Vesuvius,the inactive volcano which most of us have read of, these silly guys are going to some dumb island. I accepted their choice only to find out that it was one of the most beautiful places that I will ever see....an exotic place to be at....it seemed so untouched by humane degradation. The trip to Capri in itself was wonderful....a 1.5 hr trip on a cruise(pic 1)....This was the first time in my life that I went in the middle of the sea. I went to the tip of the cruise to experience the Titanic feel personally.

In capri, we took a ferry which showed us the whole island and we saw a lots of natural caves...limestone rocks with holes between them, people enjoying a swim in middle of nowhere....the feeling was just exceptional.

Mt Vesuvius from some distance

We went to azurra grotto, named so because its a cave where the water illuminates it to blue color. Even though the cave is dark but is brilliantly illuminated by the light coming through the entrance which is so small that u can enter or exit only during low tides. In case of a high tide, the entrance gets closed.....it was one of the place one can never forget all his life...just wonderful....

We also saw another cave somewhere up on the hills...and we decided to walk over to dat place only to find later that you can't walk to that place....you need to take a private boat to reach it via sea itself. As we'd already walked for more than a couple of kms so we decided to keep walking. Further ahead, we saw sea somewhere down there and decided to climb down the hill all the way to the sea. Later we realized it to be a risky mistake because of the steep slope and the other reason being that we also had two gals with us....and as it is u can never trust their talent. Out of six of us only two reached down with four quitting midway including me. As we managed to reach back up without anyone getting hurt, even this seemed like a brilliant adventure!!

We decided to sleep at the pebble beach tonight. Before sleeping we dived in the cold sea water at midnight , another first!!!

Next day we were to visit the city of POMPEII, which was covered by the volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. only to be discovered in 1746 , and when the whole city was excavated, dead bodies of people who were covered by the volcanic mud and dusts were discovered in heaps. There were kids sleepin with their mother, even was a dog who died while scrambling to get free of the leash he was tied with....

Crater of Vesuvius

Then we went to d see the crater of the volcano itself which was visible all this time from the distance. We found out that the whole of amalfi coast is volcanic n there is no idea where will be the exact crater of the next eruption but people over there say that it will be a huge eruption this time bcoz as its been a long time since the last eruption....

We ended our trip after seeing some actual napoli stuff near the railway station where a guy was hitting a gal as hard as he could have!!!! and nobody even cared to look at it...it seemed it was quite normal for everyone around. We obviously didn't dare to interfere.